When Politics Becomes a Risk Factor – How the Political Climate Influences the Health of Migrant Trainees
Does the political climate of a region influence the well-being and mental health of trainees with an immigrant background? Does social polarization influence (discrimination) experiences in the workplace? These are questions addressed by a new study of the “Integration@work” project carried out at the Cluster of Excellence “The Politics of Inequality”. In the project, the researchers involved from the Universities of Konstanz and Mannheim as well as the Leibniz Institute for Educational Trajectories examined the experiences of migrant trainees: “Our results show that political attitudes in a company’s region can have a significant impact on the perception of discrimination and the mental health of migrant employees,” explains Florian Kunze, project leader and co-author of the study from the University of Konstanz.
In order to explore this relationship, the researchers conducted a longitudinal study with around 1,000 trainees, asking them about their experiences in the first 13 weeks of training and then comparing this with election data at the regional level in Germany. The results show: In regions with high levels of support for right-wing populist parties, such as the AfD, migrants perceive an increasingly derogatory attitude from their colleagues over time. This affects their health and well-being: “We found that trainees in these regions increasingly reported emotional exhaustion and job dissatisfaction after three months in training,” says occupational psychologist and postdoctoral researcher Benjamin Korman. “This is not the case in areas with little support for far-right parties”.